


Not the fear of shivering (but warming up)

by kittu9



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Girls with Guns, Ishbal, POV Female Character, Pre-Canon, Psychological Trauma, War Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-01
Updated: 2011-08-01
Packaged: 2017-10-22 01:42:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/232313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittu9/pseuds/kittu9
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The war has ruined all of them. Hawkeye has a lot of time in which to think about it.</p><p>Set pre-series, during the war in Ishbal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not the fear of shivering (but warming up)

 

In the war, most of Hawkeye’s comrades recognized her by the shape of her shoulders, the way her body sloped into her gun; the weapon was an extension of her body, and the desert uniform coat she swathed about her person warded off any closer scrutiny. Even, especially when the Flame Alchemist shared her portion of the camp, Hawkeye shrank into the pale canvas, as if she desired camouflage from her allies as well, even as she daily followed every soldier’s visible movement from her nest. The names the others ought to have given her posture were shame and pain, when anyone back home might have said she should have been full of pride and violence; Hawkeye hated evenings out of the tower, she hated mornings perched in it, she hated the dry, wasteful conflict, the way the sun bleached her fair hair whiter and the way the sand scraped and powdered her skin, the lack of water and the lack of trees. She hated the thought of continuing the war, and she hated the thought of leaving it; the gunpowder had steeped itself into her blood and she didn’t know how she’d even look anyone from home in the eye again. She didn’t know how she’d make it through another four years, through her term, and come out of the military fit for civilian life.

The Flame Alchemist caught her eye and looked as sick as she felt ( _Oh, Roy_ , she thought); even though the desert heat broke after dark, and was replaced with an equally dreadful chill, the daylight had likely been burnt into his bones, more so than it had been baked into hers. She held his gaze in her own formidable one, searching for the boy who’d spent years running into her father’s house, spilling tea over the kitchen table, looking especially for the young man who’d become something shy and beloved, a memory there’d been no sense in keeping. She couldn’t quite find him, but she could see the unhappy, unshaven set of his jaw, the same weariness between his eyes that was between her own; he looked like the older brother of the boy she’d known, if he’d ever had a bother who’d been through hell.

Hawkeye shifted restlessly and averted her gaze, and she could feel his eyes sliding off her face and down the length of her arm, the weight of his stare on each of her fingers curving around the barrel of her gun. Her fingers wanted to twitch, but she did not continue the movement; it was not her way. She forced herself to settle again and felt an unnamable knot in her shoulder began to unravel, more tension crept from her the longer she was in his line of sight. If she needed to, she could drop to her knee and shift her rifle up to her shoulder and into firing position; it would take little enough time—she was talented and well-trained. She couldn’t help but think of the motion.

Across the camp, a soldier dropped a tin mug of shitty coffee, another cried and tried to hide it, one man hummed a folk song about horses and sprits riding them; Hawkeye’s father used to sing it when she was young and words still lingered in her skull, _I am your horse in the night_. Captain Hughes, sitting beside the alchemist, broke the remaining silence with a vigorous clap of his hands against his thighs and the rest of the camp circle broke their own silences to turn to him; the men, and she with them, liked listening to him talk, even if his love stories pained Hawkeye with a future full of ghosts, men who looked at her and couldn’t see anything but the war.

But Hughes didn’t talk about his girl this time, instead he smiled wickedly and challenged one of the enlisted to a children’s game. Pretty soon the whole circle of soldiers was trying to keep up, and it devolved into a combination of ‘never have I ever’ and an amalgamation of dares, most of them unspeakably foul, and thus enunciated with particular relish. Only Hawkeye and the Flame Alchemist remained on the outside, half in light and half in darkness; she was surprised by how badly she wanted to go to him, and how deeply she needed to keep her distance. Hawkeye was shaken by some thing she could not see or touch, a blind and unpredictable terror; the war was hell and it was killing her, it had already ravaged the sweetest memories of her childhood. She still so wanted to keep on living, to hold on to even these terrible things, to reach out and take hold of Roy Mustang, to hold him, to keep them both safe, from the war now and the world to come. 

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the poem “Not the fear of shivering,” by Gülten Akin.


End file.
